Dead Sea Scrolls - Chapter 1

Other Practices and Parallels at Qumran

The scrolls indicate that the Qumran sectaries regarded themselves as the true Israel surrounded by spiritual traitors and false brethren in a corrupt world. A major theme of the Dead Sea Scrolls concerns the members of the Qumran community awaiting the advent of certain messiahs from their wilderness habitation, where apostasy and persecution had driven them. A similar idea appears in Revelation 12:1–6, which describes a celestial woman giving birth to a son, who is caught into heaven to be preserved, while she (the true church or congregation of the righteous) flees to the wilderness because of intense apostasy and persecution. She was to come forth in a later time of refreshing (see also Acts 3:19–21).

Qumran texts clearly attest a form of messianic belief, as do other pre-Christian Israelite writings. The Qumran documents indicate that the community lived in expectation of a coming prophet (probably the one promised to Moses in Deuteronomy 18:18: "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth") who would precede the Anointed One. And instead of one messiah, Qumran texts disclose the anticipation of two: a priestly Anointed One (the Messiah of Aaron), and a Davidic, political Anointed One (the Messiah of Israel). While the Mosaic law was basically an interim covenant that the community members were obligated to observe with exactitude because it was designed to keep God’s people spiritually safe during the great age of wrath or wickedness, the advent of the Messiahs would usher in a new era of Mosaic purity, peace, and pardon. From the Rule of the Community and the Damascus Document we read:

They shall depart from no counsel of the Law to walk in all the stubbornness of their hearts, but they shall be governed by the primitive precepts in which the men of the community were first instructed, until the coming of a prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.68

This is the exact statement of the statutes in which [they shall walk until the coming of the Messia]h of Aaron and Israel who will pardon their iniquity.69

Believing they were God’s true Israel, the community organized their movement to correspond to biblical Israel, dividing members into priests and laity: the priests being described as the "sons of Zadok" (Zadok was high priest in king David’s time) and the laity grouped into twelve tribes. In describing true and proper temple worship, the War Rule says:

And the twelve chief Priests shall minister at the daily sacrifice before God. . . . Below them . . . shall be the chiefs of the Levites to the number of twelve, one for each tribe. . . . Below them shall be the chiefs of the tribes.70

The Qumran covenanters viewed their community or congregation (yaúad in Hebrew) as a link in the historical chain that snapped when Judah was conquered by the Babylonians. This self-identification as the sole legitimate representative of biblical Israel distinguishes the community from their opponents, who regarded the biblical period as a closed chapter, and their authorities—the rabbis—as leading a new phase in the history of Israel.71

Thus the yaúad held in high regard the prophets, prophetic teaching, and divine revelation manifested in the Bible. Almost from the start, the community subjected itself to the guidance of men believed to be gifted with the holy spirit. The first to appear among the people was the Teacher of Righteousness, as earlier noted. Because they were considered divinely inspired, the Teacher’s decisions were beyond debate and unconditionally binding on the members of community.72

After the passing of the Teacher of Righteousness, the primary leadership of the Dead Sea community was vested in a governing quorum of three priests who worked in tandem with a quorum of twelve laymen, all possessing the divine spirit:

In the deliberative council of the community there shall be twelve laymen and three priests schooled to perfection in all that has been revealed of the entire Law. Their duty shall be to set the standard for the practice of truth, righteousness and justice, and for the exercise of charity and humility in human relations; . . . So long as these men exist in Israel, the deliberative council of the community will rest securely on a basis of truth.73

One is immediately reminded of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles in first-century Christianity, and its three chief leaders, Peter, James, and John (although the latter do not appear to have functioned as a separate entity outside of the Twelve). Qumran also had an officer called an overseer, who seems to have held a position almost the equivalent to that of bishop in the early Christian church (the Greek word episcopos, translated as "bishop," literally means "overseer.") Temporal and practical matters were the responsibility of the overseer at Qumran, as they were in the Christian bishop’s role (see 1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:7–9; and even Acts 6:1–3).

However, the important point here is that the influence of the holy spirit was emphasized among both Christians and Qumran covenanters. By contrast, as Professor Talmon points out, rabbinic Judaism, which developed alongside these other two branches of Judaism, progressively moved away from prophets and "the spirit," and developed a rationalist stance. According to rabbinic tradition, after the demise of the last biblical prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—"the holy spirit departed from Israel," and from then on Israel was enjoined to incline their ear and "listen to the instructions of the [rabbinic] Sages."74

Given the biblically based environment at Qumran, and the historically connected consciousness among the people, it is not surprising that the covenanters applied the term Renewed Covenant to the totality of laws and principles to which they strictly adhered. Basing his analysis on the Damascus Document (abbreviated CD), Professor Talmon summarizes the views of the Qumran covenanters:

They view[ed] their community as the youngest link in a chain of sequential reaffirmations of the covenant, to which the Bible gives witness (CD II,14–III, 20). God had originally established his covenant with Adam. He renewed it after each critical juncture in the history of the world, and of Israel; after the flood, with Noah, the ‘second Adam’; then with the patriarchs; again with all Israel at Sinai; with the priestly house of Aaron; and ensuingly with the royal house of David, after the monarchical system had taken root in Israel. In the present generation . . . "he raised for himself" from among all evildoers "men called by name, that a remnant be left in the land, and that the earth be filled with their offspring" (CD II, 11–12). The thread of Israel’s historical past, which snapped when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, is retied with the foundation of the yaúad’s ‘renewed covenant.’75

Though grounded in the Bible, it is not exactly certain how the Qumran Essenes viewed marriage because their texts do not speak of it. Excavations of the large main cemetery, fifty meters east of the community ruins, plus excavations of two secondary cemeteries carried out by de Vaux in the 1950s present an inconclusive picture. The majority of the skeletons were male, but women and children have been identified. The problem comes in trying to reconcile the physical evidence with Pliny and Josephus. The former described the Essene community on the west side of the Dead Sea as having renounced all sexual desire. Josephus’s description of Essene practices begins by agreeing with Pliny that the Essenes shunned pleasure, passion, and marriage, but concludes with a long section that states that there was another order of Essenes which believed that complete rejection of marriage denied the chief function of life—the propagation of the race. They held, says Josephus, that if all people were to live celibate existences the whole race would quickly die out.76

If Josephus is correct that pockets of married Essenes did exist among the celibate, it becomes impossible to know without further excavation of the cemeteries just which group of Essenes lived at Qumran. Several proposals have been proffered. Perhaps the most reasonable scenario postulates that the Qumranites were an isolated male society—a celibate subsect of Essenes (either temporarily or permanently celibate we cannot tell)—who gave a proper burial to visiting relatives or travelers in the arid region who died suddenly. Of course, it is also possible to propose that both types of Essenes lived at Qumran by postulating that the community was not celibate at every stage of its history.77

One thing we are certain of is that the temple, ritual washings and cleanliness, the proper observance of feasts, festivals, and ordinances were at the absolute center of life at Qumran. The sectaries believed that the Jerusalem Temple’s priesthood was thoroughly corrupt, and as a result, so was the calendar they perpetuated in the Holy City. Thus the covenanters refused to celebrate even such holy days as the Feast of Tabernacles and the Day of Atonement at the Jerusalem Temple, preferring instead to commemorate them in their own community without burnt offerings. Nevertheless, as the Temple Scroll indicates, the idea of a pure and undefiled temple in their midst remained their great ideal. One scholar has written that "the Essenes’ basic ideal for living was to live as if they were priests dwelling in the temple itself. By this means, they sought to make their community a virtual temple, whether or not they were priests or Levites."78 The Qumran covenanters often wore white linen garments to symbolize the level of templelike purity they sought to attain.79

One of the most fascinating and important aspects of life at Qumran was centered on a calendrical system different from the one used in the Jerusalem Temple from sometime in the second century b.c. until the great destruction in a.d. 70. For the sake of simplification, let us say that the system used by the Qumran covenanters combined solar, lunar, and ecclesiastical calendars. They observed a unique festival cycle in which they did not celebrate Jewish holidays and religious feasts on the same days such memorial services were celebrated by the rest of Judaism.

In addition, through divine revelation (as they believed), the Qumranites instituted and observed festivals not extant among other Israelites. The additional festivals included the Festival of New Wine, the Festival of New Oil, and the Wood Festival. The unique calendar of the Qumran community shows the distinctive and separatist outlook of that branch of Judaism.

Some of what we have noted concerning the beliefs and practices of the Essenes at Qumran may seem to describe either a pre-Christian era "gospel" community, or even a long-lost group of ancient Latter-day Saints with their familiar-sounding emphasis on consecration, temple-worthy behavior, a strict probationary period before full membership was granted, priesthood organization, an expanded corpus of scripture, the apostate condition of the world, the term Saints being applied to covenant members, new ordinances and religious festivals, and light-darkness dualism. But such is not the case.

While the Qumran sectaries were a unified community that keenly recognized the apostate condition of Judaism and inaugurated reforms refocusing their own lives on the seminal tenets of true religion under the Mosaic dispensation, they also embraced notions contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Qumran community believed that the lame, halt, blind, deaf, and idiots remained in the care of the angels, and thus they did not admit them to their group. They did not believe that anyone had the right to worship in the name of the Lord unless a minyan (quorum) of ten individuals were gathered in the company of a priest. Contrast this with Jesus’ statement that whenever two or more were gathered together in the name of the Lord, there his spirit would be also (compare Matthew 18:19–20).

Among the other differences between Qumran beliefs and the gospel of Christ that might be presented, a final one is worth noting here. As several scholars have pointed out, Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, flatly contradicts the idea that we should love our neighbors and hate our enemies:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5:43–44)

However, hating one’s spiritual enemies is precisely what the Rule of the Community advocates in two separate sections: "Love all that He [God] has chosen and hate all that He has rejected"; also, "These are the rules of conduct for the Master in those times with respect to his loving and hating. Everlasting hatred in a spirit of secrecy for the men of perdition!"80 Thus it seems clear that some points of Jesus’ doctrine were an intentional rebuttal of Essene teaching.

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